This is technically a "Friend-Of-A-Friend" story with at least one extra degree of FOAF attached.

DW and I work near each other and met for lunch yesterday. She told me something that her hiring manager had just shared with her only an hour or so earlier. Apparently, he tried to arrange an interview by calling an applicant and had to be corrected on the proper pronunciation of the applicant's name. "It's 'LaDASHa. You have to pronounce the dash."

I recognized the story and told my wife that it had been around for at least a few years. After our lunch, she even revisited the story in casual conversation with the hiring manager. "Oh yeah, I have the application in my file cabinet." was the response.

Apparently, the story is being trotted out whenever people in hiring and HR need to express that they are making attempts to recruit a diverse workforce.

I've had several different people try and tell me this story, always in an "this actually happened to a FOAF" kind of way. The one I remember best, it was supposedly a patient's name on a sample in a laboratory.

I once found a record in my data base containing outrageous names, including some that I had seen in urban legends. It was entered as if it were a real record, but it turned out to be a sample record entered to test some things in the system, and the person who entered it was just trying to be funny. There were probably people who saw it and didn't bother to check it out further, who now think this is actually a thing that happened.

An addition to the "La-a" story. The Mail Online is claiming that a child in Australia was named KVIIIlyn. To get the pronunciation pronounce the "VIII" as
a roman numeral. Several people are saying that they think this couldn't have happened - anyone from Australia care to comment? I've put a link to the original story under the picture.